First trailer for 'Love and Other Stunts'

Love and Other Stunts trailer #1 from Joe O'Connell on Vimeo.

We are gearing up for a 2017 film festival launch of my documentary Love and Other Stunts.

We're working now on taking care of legal aspects and getting all our ducks in a row. I hired an amazing designer who will create our film poster.

The film's main character, legendary stuntman Gary Kent, is just back from Milan, where a film he starred in, Frame Switch, took best film honors at a festival there. At 83, he is rocking it.

Here is the first trailer for Love and Other Stunts!

Thanks again for your support.--Joe O'Connell

Rodriguez seeks extras as 'Alita' begins Austin shoot

Robert Rodriguez is back in action directing Alita: Battle Angel for Fox in Austin from now until February.

According to Deadline, it's set in a 26th-century dystopian future: "The film follows the story of an amnesiac cyborg who, after being rescued from a scrap heap by a doctor (Christoph Waltz), becomes a bounty hunter tracking down criminals."

Actress and singer Eiza González has the lead role. She also stars in Rodriguez's El Rey Network series From Dusk Till Dawn. Rodriguez shocked Austin locals when he moved series production to film friendlier (as in incentives) New Mexico for season three. The cast also includes Lana Condor, Rosa Salazar, Jackie Earle Haley and Ed Skrein.

It's an adaptation of  the graphic novel series Battle Angel Alita by Yukito Kushiro. James Cameron wrote the script with Laeta Kalogridis.

Third Coast Extras is handing background roles, which include punk rocker types, Asians and East Indians, but also general folks of all ages. Get more info at the casting company's Facebook page.

The film is set for a 2018 release.

The totally true story of Texas "skyscrapers"

My cover story in the June issue of Texas Co-op Power (the largest circulation mag in Texas):

On January 21, 1929, the “human fly” gripped the brick wall and slowly ascended Temple’s sleekly narrow Kyle Hotel. A crowd of observers, decked out in their Sunday best, exchanged knowing glances and looked skyward. Halfway to the 13th and final floor, the man-fly pulled a Coca-Cola bottle from his pocket and took a leisurely sip. The onlookers laughed and cheered. Those lucky enough to purchase tickets to the grand opening party ventured inside to dance to Henry Lange and his orchestra’s hit song, Hot Lips. For $1.50, they could stay the night in one of 125 rooms appointed with steam heat, ceiling fans and running ice water.

In October of that year, the stock market crashed, foretelling the Great Depression. Farmers saw cotton prices plummet. The town’s major employer, the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway, implemented layoffs and pay cuts. Four of Temple’s five banks closed. Temple’s population remained static at 15,000 throughout the 1930s. Yet the Kyle and other high-rise Texas hotels like it held on for decades as towering symbols of something larger. Soldiers huddled in them during World War II. Community groups met for lunch. High school kids held proms.

The Kyle was the third “skyscraper” in Temple. The 113-room Doering Hotel—later sold and renamed the Hawn Hotel—had celebrated its opening in 1928 with a different human fly ascending its nine levels. The six-story Professional Building came second and housed a grocery, stenography school, barbershop, law office, flower shop and cigar store.

New Yorkers might argue whether any building with fewer than 20 stories, or perhaps even 50, could be billed as a skyscraper, but architect T.J. Gottesdiener, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor decades after the firm he worked for designed Chicago’s iconic Sears Tower, perhaps put it best: “What is a skyscraper? It is anything that makes you stop, stand, crane your neck back and look up.” In the late 1920s, high-rise buildings began to ascend in Texas, and they became a symbol of good times, progress and optimism in tough times ahead.

Read the rest here.

Hello, goodbye, 'Leftovers,' and thank for all the miracles

The good news: HBO is back in Austin at this very moment shooting the third and final season of The Leftovers. Austin serves as the show's Miracle, Texas, in a world torn asunder by the sudden disappearance of 2 percent of the population. Much of the cast returns from season two.


The bad news: The Austin stay will be done in the blink of an eye, with the bulk of the season lensing in Australia. Indiewire has a great breakdown on how this fits into the plot.

For once, this isn't about the shrinking Texas film incentive funding that sent Robert Rodriguez packing to New Mexico. It's really about where the story itself is headed. And can we really be upset when Austin kidnapped the series for its second season after the first was shot in New York state? And, hey, The Son is rising in Austin (and needs extras!), so no worries, mate.

The Leftovers remains some of the best television out there. Based on Tom Perrotta's novel of the same name, the series has a fine pedigree with Damon Lindelof, the showrunner for Lost, at the helm. Read my Austin Chronicle interview with the show's executive producer Mimi Leder for more on that.

Extras! Extras! Background artistes sought for 'The Son'

This just in:

Brock/Allen Casting is hosting an OPEN CASTING CALL for a new AMC series, The Son, a period piece based on the award-winning novel by Philipp Meyer. Filming to begin early June-September 2016.

ALL POSITIONS PAID!

NEEDED : CAUCASIAN, HISPANIC, AFRICAN AMERICAN,
AND NATIVE AMERICAN INDIAN ETHNICITIES.
Males AND Females, AGES 18+, NO visible tattoos or body modifications. Headshots welcome; photos will be taken onsite.

This is a world of cowboys, vaqueros, oil loggers, and American Indians clashing on the frontiers of the American West as Texas rises to make a name for itself, spanning the years 1849 to 1915. If you have wardrobe that you feel fits this time period, please come dressed! If not, COME AS YOU ARE!

Where? When?

This coming Sunday,  May 22 from 1-6 p.m.
Best Western Plus Austin City Hotel

2200 S I H 35, Austin, Texas 78704

More on Facebook.

Dallas-based actress shines in 'No Letting Go'

Cheryl Allison's long, successful career has taken her to Broadway, but she's back in Dallas and finally breaking out on the big screen as the anchor of the film No Letting Go, which is being released on demand on cable television starting today.

It's a harrowing tale based on a true story of a mother who struggles to keep herself and her family together as one of her three sons suffers from an anxiety that blossoms in his teen years into a full-blown bipolar disorder combined with haunting depression.

Allison knows the role well. She starred in the short Illness that won so many honors on the festival circuit that filmmaker Jonathan Bucari chose to expand into a full feature film. It's inspired by the real-life experiences of Randi Silverman, who co-wrote the script with Bucari. She co-founded a support group for parents raising children with anxiety, depression and/or mood disorders. The group has served more than 800 families in the past five years. Silverman talks about that experience here.

No Letting Go provides a perfect showcase for the realities these parents face. It's beautifully shot and ably acted, with Kathy Najimy particularly shining as a no-nonsense therapist. The cast also includes Richard Burgi of Desperate Housewives and a number of soap operas, and Janet Hubert of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Silverman's real-life son Noah Silverman stars as the 14-year-old suffering from mental illness. His brother's story is the film's inspiration.

In Fort Worth, Allison is regularly seen on stage at Casa Manana, but she might see more film roles coming her way once word gets out of her strong performance in No Letting Go. It's a film that rates seeking out for its frank treatment of a topic that people are often unwilling to openly discuss.

Robert Rodriguez sends 'From Dusk Till Dawn' to New Mexico

Rodriguez and Linklater (photo by Joe O'Connell)

Cuts to Texas film incentives have a new casualty: Austin-based Robert Rodriguez likes to shoot at home, but he's setting up the third season of his El Rey network's From Dusk Till Dawn series in New Mexico with filming beginning as I type this. The first two seasons shot in the Austin area, of course. But money talks and Rodriguez walks. As have other recent Texas-set shows.

This is what happens when the Texas Legislature slices and dices its two-year film incentive program budget from $95 million to $32 million. In recent years, the incentive program has been most effective at attracting TV series to the state, including Austin-shot American Crime and The Leftovers. The former shot in Austin for both of its two seasons, while the latter shot its second season around Central Texas. The Leftovers already has a third season commitment while American Crime's future is unknown. Will either return to Austin? Stay tuned, but don't get your hopes up. At least we still have Richard Linklater. Right, Rick? Gulp.

Pee-wee Herman is back

Photo by Joe M. O'Connell

My interview with Paul Reubens in advance of the Pee-wee Herman's Big Vacation premiere in the Austin Chronicle:

Paul Reubens never once breaks into Pee-wee Herman's voice during a telephone interview ("I know you are, but what am I?"), but the odd manchild character fills the empty space around Reubens' words begging to be defined.

Kid show innocent? Subversive prop gag comedian? Pop culture icon? Early Nineties tabloid scandal-sheet cover boy? Pee-wee/Reubens is all of these things. He is both vintage, punk rock kitsch and smooth, white innocence. More importantly, he's back in Pee-wee's Big Holiday, an only somewhat unlikely collaboration with Judd Apatow that premieres at the South by Southwest Film Festival before airing on Netflix starting March 18.

"I'm part of Austin culture," Reubens said, reminding us that a big chunk of 1985's Pee-wee's Big Adventure was shot in Texas. "There's a famous sign that says 'Keep Austin Weird.' I'm represented on that artwork, and I tell it to people proudly." He's not certain of the sign's locale, but Pee-wee's image can be spotted in a Home Slice Pizza mural on South Congress emblazoned with the admonition "Don't Hate."

In 2011, Reubens also appeared at SXSW in support of HBO's The Pee-wee Herman Show on Broadway, a televised version of his stage show, which revived and essentially rebooted Pee-wee.
"I did that stage production with the idea that enough heat would happen to attract someone to make a Pee-wee movie," Reubens said. "Judd Apatow saw the show, and we set up a meeting. He was a big Pee-wee fan. He very early on said, 'I feel strongly that it should be a road movie somewhere in the same wheelhouse as Big Adventure.' That's what we did."

Read the rest here.

"Son" set to rise in Austin with Sam Neill

 Look for a 10-part AMC TV adaptation of Philipp Meyer's novel The Son to set up shop in Austin for a summer shoot. 

The acclaimed novel has been described as a "multi-generational saga of power, blood, land, and oil that follows the rise of one unforgettable Texas family, from the Comanche raids of the 1800s to the to the oil booms of the 20th century." University of Texas prof Don Graham regularly includes the novel in the his well-known Life and Literature of Texas course along side the works of Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy.

Sam Neil plays Eli, the family patriarch who was kidnapped and raised by Comanches, an experience that colors his world view.

Also in the cast are  Henry Garrett (Poldark), Zahn McClarnon (Fargo), Paola Nunez (Reina de corazones), and Sydney Lucas (Fun Home). The show was written by Meyer, Lee Shipman and Brian McGreevy. It's expected to air in 2017.

Now if someone would finally adapt Billy Lee Brammer's The Gay Place (which is also on Graham's syllabus) for TV or film we'd be set with major Texas novels being brought to the big (or little) screen. Oh, I could also go for a faithful adaptation of Dan Jenkins' Semi-Tough minus the silly new age twaddle added to the Burt Reynolds version. Pretty please?

'Kill or Be Killed"

Duane Graves and Justin Meeks finally get an Austin screening for their dark western Kill or Be Killed just prior to its DVD/stream release, and I sat down to talk with them for The Austin Chronicle.

The film has been a few years in the making. I visited the filmmaking duo on set, and you can see the story here and the rest of my set photos here. 

Justin Meeks, Michael Berryman and Duane Graves (Photo by Joe O'Connell)

They had 13 blank bullets to shoot in the crucial scene. It was 3am on a frigid morning at Jourdan-Bachman Pioneer Farms, a living history museum on a swath of tree-filled acreage surrounded on all sides by a residential North Austin neighborhood. Duane Graves and Justin Meeks were in the middle of filming their dark Western Kill or Be Killed.

Go. The explosions barked toward the houses and echoed. Go again. Four takes in all before the police cars arrived.

"It wasn't our first rodeo," Meeks said and recounted an earlier short film production halted when police arrived at a rural creekside just as an actor was yanking a fake heart out of a bloody chest.

Kill or Be Killed was originally called Red on Yella, Kill a Fella, but retitled for release March 1 by RLJ Entertainment on DVD, streaming and in Redbox locations. First they'll have an Austin screening Feb. 29 at the Alamo Drafthouse Village. It's the latest step in a slowly widening career for the unlikely filmmaking partnership that began in a college classroom and now finds both with wives and children.

Graves is the self-described emotional one who takes it all a bit too personally. Meeks is the charismatic actor/filmmaker with hair flowing down to his shoulders and an easy grin. He stars in Kill or Be Killed as outlaw Claude "Sweet Tooth" Barbee. Meeks' early work was dark, dark, dark. Graves first gained note when Slamdance screened his heartwarming and funny 2000 documentary Up Syndrome, chronicling his childhood friend Rene Moreno, who was born with Down syndrome. It includes VHS footage of the pair shooting goofy horror films in their backyards on a camera Graves begged his parents to buy him.

"Being co-directors is not for everyone," Graves said. "You need to know when to yield."

Have they ever come to blows? No, they say. But there have been disagreements.

"There are two egos here," Meeks said. "You have to put it in check."

"We end up laughing about it later," Graves said. "Two brains are better than one."

Read the rest here.